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By Root 1652 0

than my personal memory, what conclusion might another historian, less personally biased in the matter, come to about the strange case of young EJH in the Spanish revolution? Such are the problems of writing history as biography, or perhaps the wider problems of understanding human nature. At all events, my day in Puigcerda demonstrates the pointlessness of the ‘what if’ exercises in history which now carry the jargon title of ‘counterfactuals’. There is no way we can choose between the countless hypotheses about how my subsequent life might or might not have been affected, if that young anarchist border guard had not refused me entry at that first frontier crossing. And it also demonstrates that nothing serves the historian better than keeping his eyes and ears open, especially if he or she has the luck to be in the right place at the right time. Puigcerda gave me my first introduction to, and a permanent fascination with, that quintessential breeding ground for ‘Primitive Rebels’, namely Spanish anarchism. In the 1950s I found myself pursuing it ‘in the field’, largely inspired by that remarkable work of Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, which I must have read soon after its second edition came out in 1950. I can no longer remember whether I read it before or, more likely, after my first real acquaintance with Spain, which left behind ‘the deep and lasting impression which Spain makes on those who know her’.3 At least two of my visits to Spain were essentially explorations of the anarchist tradition: in 1956, when I found my way to Casas Viejas, the village which had once upon a time (in 1933) tried to make the world revolution on its own, and in 1960, when, deeply moved, I followed the traces of a recently fallen anarchist guerrillero Francisco Sabaté. 4

I am no longer sure why I decided in the Easter vacation of 1951 to travel to Spain. It was a country of whose language I was ignorant, give or take the texts of Civil War slogans and songs and the ideological vocabulary which was international anyway. As later in Italy, I had to pick it up in conversation, with occasional reference to a small pocket dictionary – easier in Italy, where talk was mainly in educated Italian, than in Spain, where my informants were hardly ever intellectuals. (If they had been, we would probably have communicated in French.) One way or another, I was to pick up some spoken if ungrammatical fluency in both languages fairly quickly, beginning immediately after my arrival in Barcelona with an evening at the Café śNuevo on the Paralelo (coffee and show, five pesetas) where my neighbour, a mason just arrived from Murcia looking for work, taught me the words for ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘thin’, ‘blonde’, ‘brunette’, and other relevant terms by pointing to the corresponding features of the (mediocre) artistes on the tiny stage.

My contemporary notes5 suggest I was attracted by the news of the great and successful tramway boycott against higher fares of early March in Barcelona, followed by a general strike, about which I wrote a piece when I returned. I thought, with excessive anticipation, that it ‘broke that crust of passivity and attentisme which (with the lack of effective illegal organisations) is Franco’s greatest asset today…’ 6 This was an overoptimistic assessment, although the first cracks in the regime appeared in the second half of that decade. The anti-Franco exiles I came to know then were not only from Republican backgrounds, such as the historian (and eventual head of the post-Franco Spanish cultural services) Nicolas Sanchez Albornoz, son of the man still recognized by the émigrés as the nominal president of a ghost-republic, but children from the families that made up the Franco establishment. One of them, my dear friend Vicente Girbau Léon, had gone to a Franco jail directly from a post in the general’s foreign service. He later shared my flat in Bloomsbury, before helping to establish the publishing house Ruedo Ibérico in Paris, whose contraband titles, including Hugh Thomas’s pioneering book on the Civil War, were to